From Food Production to Food Security - Global Environmental ...

Integrating the food system concept described in Papers 1-3 with this notion of scales andlevels provides a major contribution to the science agenda: it helps understanding of howfood systems actually operate by identifying the many and complex cross-scale and crosslevelinteractions they encompass. It also helps understand why actions and interventionsaimed at improving food security can fail:Building on earlier work on scales and levels (Gibson et al., 2000), Cash et al. (2006) proposethe idea of “Scale Challenges”. These are situations in which the current combination ofcross-scale and cross-level interactions threatens to undermine food security and the authorsidentify three such situations: Ignorance, Mismatch and Plurality. Paper 4 gives a generalexample where scale challenges affected famine relief in southern Africa in the early 1990s.However, integrating notions of scale with food system concepts more formally identifieswhere interventions to enhance food security can be made more effective. Take the case ofmaize trade in South East Africa. Both formal and informal trading systems operate atdifferent levels in time and space, and can be nested and/or overlapping. For the period 2000-2004, official cross-border trade in the region averaged 134 kt per year (MSU, 2008).Concurrent, informal cross-border trade was estimated at 49 kt for the five month period Apr-Aug 2009 (WFP, 2009) – about the same as the official amount, on an annual basis. Theseparallel systems gave rise to a number of scale challenges to alleviating food insecurity in theregion including (i) formal national and donor food security strategies not necessarily takingaccount for informal trade (Ignorance); (ii) trade barriers and lack of harmonisation oftrading systems and tariffs constraining food movements across borders (Mismatch); and (iii)both formal and informal trade systems being key to satisfying national food security(Plurality).The integration of these scale challenges within the food systems framework enriches thescience agenda by identifying novel ways of conceptualising how food systems operate. Italso helps food security planning by revealing where impediments arise to enhancing foodsystem activities, and hence where better formulated interventions are required. Further, italso helps highlight the range of actors who need to be involved in overcoming theseimpediments. These range from formal structures in regional bodies and national and localgovernment regarding reducing tariffs, customs procedures, quarantine arrangements andother barriers so as to enhance intraregional trade, to informal NGOs and civil societynetworks in providing social safety nets in times of stress.Despite the clear importance of, and value to be gained from, considering food systemactivities and their interactions across scales, and across given levels within and between eachscale, scale issues are not generally included in food “security” studies. As Wood et al.(2010) report when analysing food security issues in relation to GEC, internationalenvironmental assessments conducted to date tend to focus narrowly on the impacts ofchanges in temperature and precipitation on agricultural production. These, and otherconventional analyses, overlook key issues and linkages such as the impacts of extremeweather events on food storage and transport systems, increases in incidence of pests andpathogens (Gregory et al., 2009), and on food preparation (FAO, 2008a). As such, they miss110